Joe90 wrote:
Quote:
I know personally people who have caught it, and ended up seriously ill though not in any of the at risk groups. Healthy folk, not overweight, fit.
I'm not saying no healthy fit person under the age of 65 are COVID-resistant, but healthy fit people under 65 can also get cancer and other deadly diseases too. Yes I know you can't catch cancer like you can COVID, but you're just unlucky if you do get ill from anything when you're fit and healthy (well, anybody is unlucky who gets ill, but when you're fit and healthy you don't so much expect to get ill). Most people under 60 or 65 have less chance of getting ill or dying from COVID.
That doesn't help the older people at all though. The additional problem with covid is paradoxically that so many people can catch it and have extremely mild symptoms or no symptoms at all and still be extremely infectious- the long incubation period is working against us too, it makes it harder to detect a cluster forming.
Joe90 wrote:
I had a flu last March. I caught it off my boyfriend, who has COPD and is overweight and rather unhealthy - but I got it worse than he did, and I'm younger, healthy, average weight and have no physical health problems. I had breathing issues and thought I was going to have to go to hospital. I also had a very high temperature and fever, and it hurt to move my body. Very ill.
Apparently that same kind of flu went around and a lot of people fell ill from it, even those who had flu jabs. A lot of elderly people died from it in the care homes.
So flu can be deadly too, and a flu jab doesn't actually make people protected from every flu out there, as there are several types of flu.
Yup, most people can shrug off flu. And yes, the vaccine isn't foolproof- viral mutations mean a new one is needed each year, and that every year public health providers have to make their best guess as to which strain is going to be more prevalent.
The mortality rate for Covid is far, far higher though. The most recent estimates put fatalities at 6- 16 times higher. The reason the estimate is so wide is partly due to the nature of covid- we still don't know how many people are asymptomatic or have extremely mild symptoms on contracting it. That won't become clear until a population wide test for antibodies can be done- they also don't know how long those markers last post infection.
The 2009 flu season had the potential to be like we are experiencing now. We all got facefitted for N95 masks and issued them then too- fortunately swine flu didn't turn out to be a bad as was feared. I was freaking out back then, too.
The current state of affairs isn't going to last forever, as folks have said there have been previous outbreaks of disease that have been really bad. Either it fizzles out on it's own through herd immunity and/or people's systems becoming able to recognise and fight it or a vaccine is found.
The difference we have now compared to back then is that we can do things to protect those who are vulnerable and take steps to arrest the transmission.
Does it suck? Yeah, it totally does. I hate how the world is right now. I want things to go back to normal. But until the either the virus mutates into something far less nasty or a vaccine is found that works, it's not going to.
I'm utterly sick of it. I'm having anxiety symptoms that I thought I had left far behind. My job now entails a huge amount of telemedicine- speaking to people on the phone or over video links all day or night long depending on what shift I'm on which for an aspie is horrendously exhausting. Many people are struggling like that, I've been in contact with way more people having mental health problems than I've ever seen before.
The ray of hope I'm clinging to is that there is SO much research happening. New studies are being published all the time, adding to what we know.
01 Sep 2020, 4:40 am
